Chapter One
Leonard Sweet Introduction
Garden, Park, Glen, Meadow
IT HAS BEEN MORE THAN FIFTY YEARS since the publication of H. Richard
Niebuhr's classic text Christ and Culture (1951), which asked the question, What kinds
of relationships does the church want with the culture? Christ and Culture has been
described as "one of the most influential Christian books of the past century." One
theologian has suggested that "no other book has dominated an entire theological
conversation for so long." Niebuhr's book made a needed clearing in a forest
where a great many scholars were lost, and the church has been camping out in
Niebuhr's five-fold clearing ever since. Yet Niebuhr's words aren't the last on the
subject. Five decades after Christ and Culture, we're still asking: Is the "lived culture"
of Christian faith shaped by criteria intrinsic to itself or in mutual exchange
with the culture?
Of course the problem of how Christians relate to culture is as old as
Christianity itself. The New Testament makes it clear that there were sharp differences
of opinion in the first century over how to relate to the culture.
Yet, the Christ of the Bible is the Christ of a culture. The ultimate act of
communication in history, the Incarnation, means that Christ became a
part of culture and can't be understood apart from culture. In the same
way, you can't live in God without living in the world. That's why this conversation
is like debating the relative roles of hydrogen and oxygen in the
air we breathe.
The book you're now reading-The Church in Emerging Culture: Five Perspectives-ventures
into the same forest as Niebuhr explored. This is a book about
relationships: the symbiotic relationships between space and time, time
and eternity, gospel and culture, church and world, meaning and form. It
won't be the last word on the subject, but it represents our continuing
struggle, as followers of Christ in a changing culture, to live out the meaning
of the incarnation. This is the ongoing struggle articulated by Frank Burch
Brown: "As a religion develops, it must orient itself both in relation to the
culture of its origins and in relation to the contemporary cultures it
encounters-each of which presents alternative possibilities that a religion
may reject, modify, or eventually adopt."
For us, a half-century after Niebuhr, the "contemporary cultures"
we encounter include both modern and postmodern. And to the degree the
church has succeeded in linking its identity with the modern Western culture
it has both fought and helped form, it now struggles to understand its
identity in a postmodern culture characterized by difference, diversity, and
divergence from any single norm. (In both-and postmodern fashion, the
more we experience global homogenization, the more we value difference
and the assertion of identity markers.) So far in this struggle, much of our
conversation tends less toward constructing a new postmodern identity
than deconstructing an old modern one (see Michel Foucault's "Maybe the
target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are").
We find our brainpower drained by issues of boundaries and allegiances
during this transitional time: Which culture do we belong to or react
against or withdraw from or seek to transform? The dominant-but-fading
modern culture or the fledgling, emergent, divergent postmodern ones?
To speak of Christian identity and the identity-culture dilemma in the
midst of seemingly parallel cultural universes is to press one of the hottest
buttons in the church today.
Today Niebuhr's clearing seems less clear than overgrown with untrimmed
notions, overhanging facades, and hanging faces. While acknowledging its
influence, some theologians have also made Christ and Culture their number I
love-to-hate book: "We have come to believe that few books have been a
greater hindrance to an accurate assessment of our situation than Christ and
Culture." Niebuhr's approach "justifies the self-congratulatory church
transforming the world as it is tamed by it. It implicitly denounces alternative
approaches as sectarian, and suggests that the church should be willing to
suppress its peculiarities in order to participate responsibly in the culture."
Painting on so large a canvas would tax anyone, and Niebuhr's hand
slips often. For some, Niebuhr's monolithic treatment of culture lacks subtleties
of analysis or standards for discriminating the good and bad in culture, the
cultural dynamics of race, gender, or ideology, and various cultural spheres
such as science, art, and politics. For others the "solidity" of Niebuhr's
typologies is antihistorical and thus nearly unfalsifiable, with uneasy traffic
between the micro and the macro, thereby distorting Christian history and
making it difficult for Christians of various tribes and theological stripes to
find themselves. Still others take offense at Niebuhr's "rigging of his typology"
toward a "conversionist" stance that "sells out to a culture it professes to be
transforming" while feigning a pluralist approach and respect for all.
To top it off, there is not much Christ in Christ and Culture. In the words
of sociologist Robert Bellah, "Niebuhr was nervous about any mediation of
God, even through Christ, certainly through the Bible or the church."
Jesus' own strategy for cultural interaction-"in," "not of," but not "out of" it
either, a triangulation that makes the discussion necessarily complex-makes
only a cameo appearance in Niebuhr's discussion. According to theologian
Kathryn Tanner, for the Christian, "relations with the wider culture are never
simply ones of either accommodation, on the one hand, or opposition and
radical critical revision, on the other, but always some mixture."
In spite of all the criticism, William Werpehowski makes a compelling
case for Christ and Culture's "abiding value" based on "its delineation of a set
of theological considerations regarding creation, judgment, redemption,
grace, and sin that rightly condition the infinite dialogue among
Christians as they seek faithfully to witness to God in Jesus Christ." Yet
while Werpehowski is right that we have yet to come fully to terms with
Niebuhr, the critics are also correct: We now need to get beyond Niebuhr,
if for no other reason than Niebuhr's theoretical and cultural assumptions
were all products of the "tunnel" of modernity.
There are three problems with Niebuhr's tunnel vision.
1. First, Christianity began in premodernity, not modernity or post-modernity.
St. Paul launched Christianity in the and-also marketplace of
Athens (Acts 17:17), not the Mall of America or the IMS (instant messaging)
of AOL. Niebuhr's modern, either-or bias led him to weight the five categories-condemnation
of culture, toleration of culture, conversion of culture, adoption
of culture, and enrichment of culture-so that his favorite (conversion of
culture)would win. But what if Christianity needs multiple ecosystems as
much as it needs multiple Gospels? What if God can be found throughout
history working in each clearing?
2. Second, Niebuhr understood change in incremental, not exponential,
terms. Of course the world has always been changing. Too much hokum
goes under the intellectual rubric of "change." In the early twentieth century,
when cars were first being produced, the top speed of automobiles was 20
m.p.h. The "experts" of the day were obsessed with the world's new "speed
mania," even giving that name to a new "medical condition" (shades of
ADD/HDD?) of speed addiction. According to William Lee Howard, M.D.,
in his admonition to parents, "Speed Mania" ((1905), "The facts we have to
seriously consider are not those dealing with accidents or risks to lives, nor
with the effects on the adult of middle life, but the harmful effects on the
very young who are being literally whirled through the world at an age when
their nervous systems need quiet and normal development."
There is an old Latin expression: tempora mutantur et nos, mutamur in illis-"times
change and we change with them." But the enormities of contemporary
cultural changes are unprecedented, and Niebuhr didn't anticipate them.
Many are even calling our time a "paradigm shift." All contexts heretofore
will be unfamiliar and unknown. In times of paradigm shift, Thomas Kuhn
argued, everything goes back to zero and starts over anew. No wonder
Neibuhr's modern grappling with the Christ-and-culture issue is less than
fully satisfactory in our emerging postmodern context.
For the Christian, of course, times of shifting paradigms take us back
not to zero, but to origins. Our time is overdue for an original look at the
relationship of Christ and culture-not "starting from scratch," but "starting
from origins." True originality is a homecoming; not overturning doctrines
but returning to the origins of the faith and letting the primeval forest reseed.
3. Third, Niebuhr failed to consider what the relationship of Christ
and culture might look like from outside Christendom, a world where the
church had-at the time of his writing-a much more preferred place at the
table. Niebuhr's assumptions were shaped by a world in which it behooved
Robert Chambers, the Victorian Scottish publisher and naturalist, to keep
pews in two different churches. If he was absent from one, the congregation
presumed he was in the other and his reputation remained intact. In the
same way, Niebuhr assumed a world in which Christianity knew its place,
and its place was enforced by the back of culture's hand.
(Continues.)
